Fool's Gold Nugget: Flying off the Handle

​Bringing fresh blood to old things.
Zach Hively

My dogsitter leaves me surprises every time I return home. A book to read. My dogs’ poker winnings. Streamers and empty wine boxes from the dogs’ wild parties (which reportedly keep him up too late).

One time, he left me an axe.

This axe was not a new axe. Its head was rusted over. The handle, washed-out gray. You couldn’t swing it without the head sliding four or six inches. It was perfect.

“Found it on a hike,” he wrote in the welcome-home note. Where? I asked. “The dogs swore me to secrecy,” he said. “Better ask them.”

I figured this axe would make a perfect wall-hanging. It had that rustic feeling that city folks pay big big dollaz for. Plus, if my home ever stumbled into a slasher flick, the axe head would come flying off riiiight when the masked lunatic went to swing it at me, throwing him (or her!) off balance and giving me my window to pee myself.

But I didn’t hang it, because of course I didn’t. I let it sit by my firewood rack all winter. Then I tucked it in the shed. Then I pulled it back out this fall. Was I ever going to do something with this? Or should I just toss it back into the desert for someone else to find?

Because I had big projects that required a solid reason to procrastinate, I said, I’m a-gonna re-handle this axe.

So I am. It’s not done yet, because it turns out that a distinct lack of woodworking tools and general axe-shafting knowledge is a detriment to successful (or even unsuccessful!) axe restoration.

But I am falling in love—deeply, madly, Christmas-movie-level in love—with bringing new life to old things.

This undoubtedly has nothing to do with the fact that I am careening toward forty and looking to make certain I am both relevant and useful. Nope. It might have something to do, however, with making something tangible with my hands. Hands that are increasingly knurled from using the wrong wood file and trying to open a dried-up bottle of wood glue.

Could I buy a new handheld wood-splitter at the hardware store for under a hundred bucks? Absolutely. Am I likely to spend more than a hundred bucks on this project with a reasonable chance of ending up with a handle-shaped piece of kindling? For sure. Could I, though, grow as a human being, developing skills that bring me closer to my forebears who knapped their own flint and smelted their own iron and probably, at more than one point, cut off their own fingers?
Perhaps. But my ancestors aren’t likely to get too close until they’re reasonably certain this antique axe head won’t come flying off the handle.

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